Vietnam releases dissident ahead of president's US visit

Jun 10, 2007, 14:28 GMT

Hanoi - Viwetnamese dissident Nguyen Vu Binh, jailed since late 2002 on political grounds, has been released from prison, an official confirmed Sunday.

'We released Nguyen Vu Binh yesterday under an amnesty decision,' said Trinh Thuong Xuyen, deputy director of Ba Sao Detention Center in Ha Nam province. 'He had been in the prison for more than four years. If there had been no amnesty, Binh would have had to serve more than two more years in prison.'

Police arrested Binh, 39, a former journalist for the Communist Party publication Tap Chi Cong San, in December 2002 after he published a series of pro-democracy articles on the internet.

The government accused Binh of passing information to overseas Vietnamese groups, and sentenced him to 7 years in prison in December 2003 for espionage.

Binh's release came in advance of a planned visit to the United States by Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet, who is scheduled to meet with US President George W. Bush on June 22. That visit was called into question by American displeasure at Vietnam's crackdown on dissidents over the past six months.

Vietnam expert Carlyle Thayer of the Australian Defence Force Academy said Binh's release was a concession to the US in exchange for letting the visit go through.

'It is clear that Binh's release is directly related to the fact that representations had been made' by the US to Vietnam that Triet's meeting with Bush might be postponed, said Thayer. 'The Vietnamese aren't making the connection, but there obviously is one.'

Since the beginning of 2007, Vietnam has arrested roughly a dozen democracy activists, most members of the group 'Bloc 8406,' launched in April 2006. Several have been sentenced to prison.

The arrests led to tension between the two countries, which otherwise enjoy increasingly friendly diplomatic and trade relations. In May, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the Vietnamese crackdown, and the White House issued a statement deploring the arrests.